Jordan Peterson, Reddit’s Dad
I’ll preface what I’m about to say with this – I actually quite like Jordan Peterson, while I think a lot of the more messianic stuff surrounding him is bullshit I think he’s a good person who is truly trying to help people. I don’t think he’s a fraudster. But while listening to him speak recently, it struck me that he reminded me of someone – not a specific person, an archetype. (I assume as a student of Jung that he’d appreciate that word.) I’m not sure what I was listening to… it could have been one of the phenomenally popular Joe Rogan podcasts he’s recorded, or his series on biblical stories, or his recorded college lectures. The dude’s put a lot of content out there. But in any case it struck me after a little while what it was he reminded me of and it permanently changed the way I saw him. A Dad. He reminded me of a father.
Don’t these people – Peterson’s fans – have real fathers? Well, the first thing to say is that lots of them don’t. Due to divorce rates and rates of family break-up, many men grow up either never knowing their father or without a strong father figure in their life, particularly in the US. Acknowledging that fact, all you have to do is read some of the Youtube comments to see that they’re all nice young middle class men, probably many of them from stable homes. It seems reasonable to believe some portion of them do have two parents still together, and a father still actively involved in their lives. So why that need for a father figure?
In the past a lot of art and media commentary focused on the fact that boys were increasingly raised by women and without fathers (Fight Club is an example of this genre). The situation we have now is that (for middle class white kids at least) the fathers are still there, but in many cases aren’t really recognisable as the father-archetype. Educated, middle class men with kids are no less likely than their sons to have been moulded through college and the media into adopting a left wing, Social Justice oriented mindset. The well-intentioned and sincere cartoon of fatherhood that Peterson provides, the way he makes “Clean Your Room” a sort of moral clarion call, his extolling the virtues of a conservative mind, his unwillingness to put up with all the high falutin’ “theories” about “gender studies” and safe spaces… these kids with their modern ideas.. and the hair, you can’t tell if they’re girls or boys…. It’s a pantomime of a type of father that increasingly doesn’t really exist anymore for middle class kids, other than as a figure of fun in sitcoms.
The sad difference between a father and a father-figure is that latter has no true authority over you the way a father does. When you’re a kid, and your Dad tells you to clean your room, he can make do it. Actually, he can’t, as many of us found out when we were kids. But him telling you to perform the task creates a kind of moral imperative for you to do it. While you’re under my roof you’ll live by my rules! Now get up those stairs and… Peterson can suggest that you clean your room, and that by doing so you are enacting a principle you can build you world around. But he has no true moral authority over you and he can’t punish you if you don’t. If you want you can close the tab on him mid-sentence and go and play Overwatch in your underwear for six hours and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it. No, only your actual dad can do that and even then, only when you’re a kid. From reading commentary online from his admirers I would guess that most JP admirers are younger than 40, and most of those 18–25. So if they are kids it’s not it a legal sense.
The best case scenario is that Peterson’s encouragement is going to cause his audience to re-evaluate their lives and their priorities, and make some sorts of decisions about where this is all going. In the longer term those changes will almost certainly fade away – they always do, that’s the self-improvers dilemma. Perhaps enough of the advice soaks in to improve their lot in a small way for the longer term, which is nothing to scoff at.
What is it that’s missing that would create the longer, deeper change? The answer seems clear enough: God. Peterson himself seems to be religious. (I say seems to be because as soon as he talks starts talking about his faith, he uses it as a starting point for a journey into other topics that I humbly admit I can’t follow – it’s a common problem I have with him). Maybe God does for him what he does for his students. Again, the difference is that for the true believer, God’s existence is an imperative, not a suggestion.
In Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind, he cites a study of communes, which divided its subjects into religious ones and non-religious ones. This study took place over a number of years, looking at whether being bound by a secular or religious impulse influenced the success of the groups. At the end of the study, all of the secular communes had collapsed and dissolved and none of the religious ones had. The religious communities were bound together by revealed truth that gave them a connection to each other that went beyond mere friendship or companionship. To doubt, let alone leave, was in itself a sin. Indulging in the sin would be a black stain on your soul, put there by God, discernible by all and ineradicable. Even for people who might have lost their faith, the shame of making a decision to abandon the commune would be too much to bear. Peterson describes secular ideologies (like Social Justice) as crippled religions. For all our talk of the adherents to those ideologies being fanatics – if the fire leaves you, you can walk away without damning your mortal soul. There is no eternal force compelling you follow a path or risk damnation. So perhaps the end point of Petersons fans if they truly want to change is not self-help, or reason, but faith.
It’s not his fault that his people are using him to try and fill the holes that modern liberalism leaves. Those holes create yearnings most keenly by men. For a stern and certain father, for a feeling that certain things are sacred beyond identity and that we should revere those things, for a need to identify legitimate authority and wisdom outside oneself, for anything that tells you there is a moral order to the universe that is objectively and eternally right and true, that you must be true to.
Its been reported that Peterson is making a tremendous amount of money every week from Patreon donations, an extraordinary return for anyone, let alone a tenured university professor. At some stage he’s going to have to do something with all this feverish admiration and all that money, beyond just lectures and Youtube videos. There’s a clear step he could take that would be both the helpful continuation and logical end to what he’s done so far – he needs to start a religion.
